Jane Jacob’s “Systems of Survival”

I have little to say to improve on the review by Mary Ann Glendon but I did find Jacob’s terms, “commercial syndrome” and “guardian syndrome” peculiar.
I notice that the two sorts of institution specialize respectively in voluntary and involuntary transactions.

This is the only non technical book that comes to mind that leaves me feeling that there remain important insights here that I have not grasped.
This book has meat!

As I finished the book I realized that there were many important things that bore on the economy that I did not understand, and neither did the communists.

Douglas Allen’s Institutional Evolution feels to me like chapters that might have been found in Systems of Survival.
Allen explains some of the same phenomena in ways that complement Jacob’s explanations.